jesse jackson frees two americans behind bars in africa we'll ask him about the case and we'll have a weigh in on the twenty twelve protests presidential race and a live interview next on r.t. . and we live in a high tech world of e-mail smartphones and chatting but do you know how much the u.s. government is tracking your every move our t. has a privacy check coming up for you straight ahead. plus the wall street journal one of america's leading newspapers is under fire the paper has been running op ads for

mitt romney's advisers without disclosing the ties we'll speak with media matters the group reporting on this case of subjective journalism. it's friday september twenty eighth five pm in washington d.c. i'm meghan lopez and you're watching r.t. all right well starting off this hour reverend jesse jackson has made quite an impact on the u.s. throughout the years you probably know his name from his many crusades for human rights so much so that he was nominated for the nobel peace prize this year his latest cd is brokering an agreement for the release of two imprisoned american citizens from prison in. the dual citizens who are serving sentences for treason. to talk about this sad more reverend jesse jackson joins us now he's the founder and president of the red rainbow push coalition thank you thank you for joining us

reverend jackson so let's start off by talking about the two gobby of americans who helped free from prison can you tell us about that it's a good news. for weeks ago that none gunman had been executed and thirty more were it to be executed based upon their definition of what was a capital offense and so i mean they called the president's office in the government called for the democrats with whom i met across the moment across to you is that absolutely bring a bill bishop to meet with him the foreign minister called back and said we would be allowed such a meeting to do that to burry a hold of executions of from two weeks ago and then in the meeting of five decided to think one and then they have a moratorium on executions so thirty law that would have been lost have not been spared and two americans were appalled them and to them and so in all thirty eight

people lives have been spared and four have been pardoned of them for that i want to thank him because he had the choice and the power to take their lives but he made a choice i think the best chance of them and the people and what inspired you to get involved in this six gone be a and these cases in particular. well approach to yield food trying to get prisoners out of. syria. iraq yugoslavia. liberia because we wanted to and we tried we took the risk i know that gap between governments often not communicate with each other they're all to communicate with each of us sometimes hostile relations with the humanitarian we operate with not based upon auguring sovereignty based upon auguring last august government relations it was a humanitarian plea that given that some good things are happening in the governmental leadership for example a building an educational system and it's free in the by the half women the being

educated and that's a step in the right direction. the health care system that is that it is in a hospital and you see the growth of the hospitals and mental cinema is free the building on the on the oceanfront in the gum ball that is in fact this track that by the issue of killings in jail that was a holding up access to free press opening of ponding some prisoners and stop an execution is the right thing to do it's also a very practical benefits i think the president really making that judgment we tried to get our own government on to the not killed troy davis in georgia for the government and not do it in oklahoma and texas law to california we were not successful we were successful in the government and we followed that troy davis case closely so let me ask you this what were the circumstances that led up to this

point and cumbia without all of the number of executions you said that the two were on trials are being held for treason so let me ask you how the circumstances led up to this point and how you were able to broker the deal. the boss the trees and kind of the various. sometimes it is a position sometimes it is difficult things that we do is not going to argue the case of what was true similar not which is like a legal argument of the right which is one of our an argument we made a humanitarian plea at the present almost like asians in various african union meetings he said to flee all are really low that they were scheduled to die on their schedules to live and to schedule be imprisoned for a long time in the home with their families out hope that the success of this will be of such until we'll be able to get more prisons out of the prison and screened

more time on containers economic and health care the relevant in that country deserves it the president has the power really to make it happen so again we thank him for what he has done and i know that brock obama has actually ramped up u.s. involvement in africa so let's go ahead and switch gears a little bit and talk about this he wraps up this involvement to go after the lord's resistance army and joseph koni in particular in central africa now this is the army the group invisible children and many others have been comparing against what are your thoughts about this increased presence in the region and in this continent. what do imma say i've got to mention that the gum has now been sent most and most women christians are co-existing very well that they're related to given the politicking to go that it's american so that all the churches around the u.s. embassies and muslims around the world in the gum we have that are not the case and the good signs of a chance of development because you know they're very much investment. so that's

a good sign i think that in the other because the u.s. has a presence if it's with the mission of the government if it's all right. if it's if it's against the will of the use of intelligence devices and the use of drones always question but certain that it must be with the consent of the people involved and you were just talking about drones now president obama has become known as the drone president and one of the platforms that president obama is really ramping up in these elections this twenty twelve elections is his foreign policy experience he is after all the person that con and capture killed of some of it a lot and now mitt romney on the other hand has no foreign policy experience the visit he did with israel in the u.k. you know america's closest allies they didn't go well and those are our friends so is this a positive for team obama or just a negative for america as

a whole that neither one of these really have the type of foreign policy experience that maybe american a that that's point expression and considering everything that's going on in the middle east and all the i'm an anti american sentiment. urge them on the campaign on the war in iraq was a bad idea when in their own false information lost lives and money on the war on the three trillion dollars the screen on that was very expensive and it was the wrong target what could have triggered well as do today why but every state budget there but there are people least teaches from but one hundred thousand troops in iraq a home that and that is a because those in afghanistan on the way out of them that that's another step in the right direction and so i see the attempt to move the needle against on this very expensive wars in the region i do think that now the middle east issue has come from some again because netanyahu has inject himself in the middle of the

campaign so they present iraq as talk with him by phone or on the talk with him by phone to put him in it puts ms and then you're on an interesting position that having the president and his opposition talking with them about their policy that they would talk it out and the obama that we do not need to expand a war zone and in the middle east well we all know that tensions between israel and iran are at a critical point netanyahu did do a pretty good job of drawing that red line at the u.n. general assembly now we also just found out that the mitt romney foreign policy team recommended he reversed obama's two thousand and nine executive order that all laws torture what are your thoughts on this well the torture tactics in her purse and the assassination of factors for the one thing that happened in the case of trying to get the americans. doesn't that and the universe of this event. teach out of the government was we could never ever log against capital punishment

because we do the most of it because in this or in august it's locking up on that. because we do a lot. when we. follow through this fascination with the my old moral authority the. public was the base but it was wrong. you cannot do it and they sold the home but you believe will not around the world and reverend jackson for the first time possibly ever we have two men that are running against one another that have no military experience whatsoever mitt romney is a businessman barack obama he's definitely got a bunch of experience as far as working with in congress goes but not necessarily with militaries we were still in afghanistan and pakistan plus we're engaged in targeted strikes elsewhere so from a foreign policy standpoint is there or is this a recipe for disaster with these two candidates. bill clinton the. milk expert

for example in the for the. booster that i have but the fact is two men will hopefully will make someone's choices and the choices mean the military choices i hope they will be able we can not find a way out the crisis in afghanistan and pakistan is going to take strong diplomacy and really multilateral cooperation because not alone the middle voice went alone and there it was it was the the kobo of coalition we went in there basically bush and blair a little and they rolled and then we paid a big price that was learned from their wrong lesson we went into libya in the name of trying to. stop the spread of terrorism in the now with a very unstable government in libya so hopefully the chaos that we are now

experiencing will be lessons learned that's another go further in this direction all right reverend jesse jackson we really appreciate your time today sir reverend jackson is the founder and president of the rainbow push coalition he's also turning seventy one on october eighth so a very happy early birthday to you sir thank you all right time now for an update on your privacy we want to talk to about take a look at the quaids the government is stripping away your digital rights and also ways that you are making it easier for them as well as for hackers to access your information earlier our five are who are arctic web producer andrew blake join me to talk about all of this take a look. most of data that we have today on the internet isn't actually on our own computers anymore even our own homes we're actually keeping practically everything like you said including what we listen to and what are bank numbers somewhere in the cloud has it where and who can monitor that well that's really up to whoever

maintains those servers the most information we have that isn't actually in our possession anymore just kind of out there in the open third parties manage it and then the current cypress tree legislation that's being proposed in congress and the one that the obama administration is trying to push out in executive order a lot of the information could easily be intercepted in a matter of couple of months really depending on how this legislation moves through washington and what we're saying what we're talking about right now is the cloud specifically the amount of data stored so right now we go off of is the one nine hundred eighty six electronic privacy act and that is what they legislate with saying that if our information is in a storage unit for over one hundred eighty days that they can access it was relatively few complications and they don't necessarily need a warrant the problem is that that nine hundred eighty six legislation wasn't accounting for where what we have to date they know i've been violated or everything he did and given that there is only one definition of a cloud going back to one hundred six actually you tell me that we're going to talk

about the e.c.p.a. and i for some reason had these linger on my desk remember these two so i don't think this is a remark that i'm really not in one thousand nine hundred five so we're using a legislation that goes back almost a decade before this and that's what we're using to safeguard our privacy is right now and you would think that under an administration that advertises being the most transparent and the most open that people would be secure in the communications today but if you watch r t would know that you know myself and other guest will regularly come on and explain that that's really not the case unfortunately as of late and just this week the american civil liberties union released a bunch of information that they got to a freedom of information act request which kind of proves that by the way the white house. is conducting more warrantless scary scary surveillance than ever before and why it's not just a minute let's go back to the nine hundred eighty six because i just want to put it in perspective for our viewers to be able to see what was happening in one thousand nine hundred sixty i think we have a graphic this is apple computer from nine hundred eighty six this is the apple two

g.s. complete with floppy disk drives and i mean entered this is a time when the challenger exploded when we were talking about when a floppy disk a male actually fairly certain they have one of those in the sony and museum of american history now and yet so we're using that type of legislation that was made for those computers to dictate what we're doing on computers like your map that you have spending over there i mean it's no surprise there is no argument here that people are trying to move different sort of legislation in congress right now that would protect and least do something to our digital rights and how we use the internet and you know i would go ahead and say that you know my argument personally is that i think there are some restrictions that a certain necessarily restrictions but there should be laws implemented to keep things up to snuff as it will only talk about surveillance so that the whole of their whole other can of worms and unfortunately where you know we are using these these antiquated legislations in order to to decide what is just out in the open

for the government and we're seeing that it's kind of scary now so what these things are we basically opening up the door to our lives to the government because of these old legislations. absolutely precisely yes if we talk about are you ready to talk about ready to talk about taking a hiatus of this i am so eager so yeah let's go back a couple of days a.c.l.u. they've filed a foyer request back earlier this year and you know we were going over the documents they finally got yesterday i'm sorry earlier this week and what it shows is that under president obama the white house has authorized more of these particular kind of surveillance court orders to monitor americans can. on occasions more in the last two years and in the entire decade before that there's a couple different things that the use one is called a trap and trace surveillance the other one is called a pen register and what these do is whether it's your phone conversations or your internet activity the government can go ahead and they can have

a judge sign off saying collect that information but because they don't collect all of the information it's much easier to get these to set in stone and in fact last year it's like thirty seven thousand of these happened which is three hundred a day or so i'm not sure i'm no mathematician but i'm pretty sure it's roughly on there so three hundred times a day a judge says sure thing police you can go ahead and access this information using a pen register or a trap and three surveillance devices and what that does is a lets authorities go in and they can see who you're calling and who's calling you how long your phone calls last where they are rationing from where they're going to but then also when we look at to the whole internet side of it these devices also let the government police and law enforcement they can monitor who you're e-mailing who's sending the e-mail how big the e-mail is what the subject line of the e-mail is so even if i really heavily encrypt something and i send you a message and it goes from into place to make a lopez in the subject line says hey meghan this is really important don't let

anyone know that the government will still see that subject line hey negatively in part because even though that's you think that you can create you know you're sitting in say or you're subject not only do you not encrypted but the whole point of these senators and trap and trace surveillance technologies is that the government can get away with doing so many of these thirty seven thousand a year in two thousand and eleven because there are no contents or no content surveillance so the government actually want to see the body of her e-mail that they do but so they don't want to see what's actually happening in the e-mail dishonesty that matter information what's in the header you know who is doing what with whom and can actually see what that content is but that's often enough just to you know go ahead and pursue a court case and all they need to say to a judge is this information made a. help us with a criminal investigation and sign off and bam you got it just like that just like that ira let's i want to also bring up the point that it does the e-mails that we send although it might seem like the nine information it could potentially reveal a lot is what you're arguing about a person so we actually have

a full graphic of craigslist i mean craigslist alone can be an indicator it can say what your sexual preferences i mean there were just looking at the front screen of craigslist this is more into the personal section you know and other things we couldn't show you they're a little bit too raunchy for our t. but it really shows you know if you click on that it can see they can see what you're clicking on now that's easily as long as they have one of these court orders more like reading hundreds a day tens of thousands of years or tens of thousands per year but they're going up actually between two thousand and two thousand and eleven the obama administration has increased internet wiretaps by three hundred sixty one percent and if the you go and look at the phone wiretaps sixty percent right there where you realize more people are communicating via e-mail obviously well let's quickly look at those charts that you're bringing up if we could bring up the graphics that we have so the first one they are talking about is this one right here this is

a chart there reveals the number of people whose telephones and the pen register and trap and trace surveillance that actually tripled in during the obama administration and it also went in the past two years was more than the entire previous decade and if we go ahead switch that other one really quick the second chart shows the number of pen register and trap and trace orders that went up like you said three hundred sixty one percent between two thousand and nine and two thousand and eleven so this is an invasion of privacy is it not i would say so but if you can have some sort of federal judge say oh you need this information for some sort of criminal investigation absolutely and you know after the police collect. information they see who you're talking to and how long to talking to them from and where you're sending the e-mails from to you graphically they can take that information do whatever they want and they never have to go back to the court and say this is what we do with it it's just always going to be there and yes means nothing because our answer blake i'm sure you're going to be watching us diligently

and reporting about it on our website if you much of our state dot com slash usa web producer andrew blake i think that you know much by pleasure. well the wall street journal is arguably one of the most respected newspapers in the us one with a well known conservative stance but it turns out ten of its op ed writers the ones who railed against president obama relentlessly during his tenure are actually mitt romney's advisers and interesting facts that the newspaper failed to disclose so is this another example of subjective journalism or are the opinion pages fair game for more i was joined by jeremy holden director of research at media matters i first asked him what's the big deal about wall street journal having conservative writers. well there's no big deal in the wall street journal having conservative writers in their editorial pages the problem becomes one of disclosure of giving the reader the relevant context to choose for themselves how how much of a grain of salt they need to take this analysis with i think with somebody like

john bolton you know people can look at it and say well it's pretty clear where john bolton is coming from but at the same time it's worth knowing when he's opining on the election when he's opining on president obama it's worth knowing it's worth letting the reader know that he's also advising mitt romney he has a stake in the outcome of this election long we've seen john bolton frequently on fox news so it really isn't a secret knowing in his case anyway that he does lean to the right but some of these other people i mean unless you're really paying attention to the article names you're not going to know why this person has an opinion and it's not going to be put in context and that's what they're saying is important right yeah that these people are advising that romney so they're giving you advice there on the journal's editorial pages or you know writing columns critical of the obama administration touting something that mitt romney is trying to do it's important that the rear know that this person has a vested interest that this person your readers don't know who max boot is and if

the wall street journal tries to say that this is just some former undersecretary he used of service in the government that doesn't mean anything in the context of this election this person is a romney adviser and that's what the wall street journal is not telling a story and they have gone well beyond the election season and beyond just criticizing president obama they've actually gone to praise mitt romney so they're using their opinion pieces in order to be able to bolster up another person maybe what you're saying is that they could just use a little disclosure line saying hey by the way i work for mitt romney and let me ask you this is this free advertising free political advertising for the romney campaign we know we've talked to some editors for. across the country current and former editor of the major newspapers and you know they they all said that this is like kind of shameless that the journal is hiding this information and one of them actually said it's getting to the point where the wall street journal needs to put a disclosure note on the top of its editorial page saying that the mitt romney

campaign approves of these pages and i mean but it is the opinion page we do know where to go where not to go just like what c.n.n. and fox news and m.s.m. if the and all those other channels you know what you're going to get when you see that is that something i mean considering the fact that the wall street journal leaning to the right is it something that's really that surprising at all that this is happening well i think the role of in context is important because if you take take karl rove for example karl rove is a well known political figure from the conservative movement chief advisor to the bush administration and he's written written countless columns for the wall street journal during this election cycle but up until very recently he was always cited only as a former bush adviser but he also is playing a key role as a major fundraiser for the romney campaign running a major super pac to try and help defeat barack obama and so the question becomes is the context here that karl rove is a conservative the he's a former bush adviser now the context here is that as he's opining on the election

he has a stake in the election i think the same is true of these ten romney advisers and their twenty three columns they're trying to manipulate views of the election it's important not what they used to do it's important what they are doing right now. and i mean this certainly isn't the only case of this happening right. how do you. have editorial writers go i'm sure that mitt romney's advisers are not the only ones that are out there writing pieces that are a problem at romney and obama well look we think disclosure is an important point of the media landscape and that you know it's ok to be a conservative and to write your opinions and your opinion the wall street journal it's important that those opinions be honest but it's also important that the reader knows what your perspective is beyond just i'm a conservative it's important to say i also advise in this campaign that's not a partisan issue this this extends to everybody and to all media outlets it's important to disclose to your readers to your viewers the point of view of the person who's giving them a now analysis i mean i guess what i'm asking is is there more cases of this or is

this an isolated incident or is this a wider problem that we're facing with the media today. well we certainly have seen that it's a major problem with the wall street journal it's an interesting question to look beyond that i think the pressure to disclose is only going to get greater we've seen the wall street journal just this week finally disclose roads connection to the super pac but this is not the end of that conversation and it's not limited to just one article or one writer or ten writers disclosure is important across the media landscape well let's take a look at i mean it's no secret that people are losing faith in american media these days i do want to bring up a graphic to kind of show this loss of faith so this poll shows that over half of americans don't trust the media sixty percent said they have not very much trust and none at all i mean based on this and other cases of subjective journalism are people losing confidence and rightly so. i don't think there's any question that people are losing confidence in the media the numbers that you cite kind of bear

that out i think going back to this issue of transparency and disclosure i think this is a way that media can help get the public trust back by saying this is the perspective that this particular writer is coming from it's important to note that this note this issue of disclosure is not just on the editorial pages of the wall street. all right we were talking about karl rove they've called coral world they've called it his super pac in the past without making that connection that this person is on the payroll here he's also has a vested financial stake in this election so this does extend beyond the kind of subjective editorial pages and i think it is important if the media wants to gain back the public trust that they treat the public they treat their readers and their viewers on with honesty and i do want to take we just have about a minute left i do want to take a closer look at. fox news m s n b c and c.n.n. really quickly so fox news is doing phenomenally in their rankings they're blowing it out of water on the other hand you have c.n.n.

they're flopping i mean they're kind of trying to switch things around so that they can try to keep above the water but we know the fox news wave right we know that m.s.m. we see sways left some critics have said that c.n.n. simply transcribes what is going on in the world and that that's not journalism anymore i mean do you have to have commentary in order to be successful it stays i think c.n.n. has had commentary in the past they've certainly appeared to be in a transition phase right now i'm not sure that going after the fox news sean hannity model is the way to go let's keep in mind that c.n.n. are the people who brought us lou dobbs and glenn beck and so there has to be a way to present information to the public in a way that grabs viewers right jeremy thank you so much for joining us that was jeremy holden director of research at media matters thank you and speaking of subjective journalism we have a prime case of t.v. cable news trying to be first with the story on the hopes of gaining

a few ratings points just about an hour ago fox news covered a police chase that started in phoenix the chase had lasted over an hour but the suspect jumped from the car and ran into a field with a live news chopper overhead the suspect pulled out a gun and shot himself in the head on live television fox news quickly went to a break and then came back with this apology. really messed up. and we're all very sorry. that didn't belong on t.v. we took every precaution we knew how to take to keep that from being on t.v. and i personally apologize to you that that happened. now what happened to this van is tragic but what's sad is that this is the state of the mainstream media here in the us today the if it bleeds it leads mentality they were so eager to cover this so-called breaking news that they broadcast live a man shooting and killing himself.